[Sprite_tm]’s three-component FM transmitter

When the Regency TR-1 transistor radio came out onto the market in the 1950s, it was hailed as a modern marvel of microelectronics. With only four transistors and a handful of other components, the TR-1 was a wonder of modern engineering. [Sprite_tm] may have those old-timers beat, though. He built an FM transmitter with the lowest parts count of any transmitter ever.

Like most of [Sprite_tm]’s builds, it’s an unimaginably clever piece of work. [Sprite] overclocked the internal RC oscillator of an ATtiny45 to 24 MHz. After realizing the PLL running at four times the frequency of the oscillator was right in the middle of the FM band, he set about designing a tiny FM transmitter.

[Sprite_tm] remembered his work on MONOTONE and made a short song for hit ATtiny. The firmware for the build takes the notes from his song and varies the 96 MHz PLL frequency a tiny bit, thereby serving as a tiny FM transmitter.

Does it work? Well, if you want to compare it to a Mister Microphone, the range is incredibly limited. That being said it works. It’s an FM transmitter built out of a microcontroller and a battery, and that’s very impressive. Check out [Sprite_tm]’s demo after the break.

51 thoughts on “[Sprite_tm]’s three-component FM transmitter”

LOL :) I know hack could have as many definitions as there are persons defining it. AFAIK this used new off the shelf components, IMO it’s build. Not that I would ever say builds don’t have a place on Hackaday. Even novelty builds.

Actually, the song isn’t mine. It was distributed with Monotone; I think Trixter mentioned somewhere who tracked it. Hmm, I think I’m gonna look the name up and edit my article, I hate taking credit where it isn’t due.

This SO reminds me of one of my favorite(!!) TRS-80 video games, “ROBOT-ATTACK!!”.
It was found that the program generated RF noise and the audio for the game could be heard by tuning a radio to the right spot.

Would like to play that again but I never bought a TRaSh-80, school “computer lab” had them and of course endless hours spent at Rat-Shack.

Not sure how you can over-clock something where the parts (time-base crystal) is built in, and software set.

I have seen PLL modulation tricks when “MagicBoxes.com” was making Jerrold “test-cubes”. Very entertaining… while it lasted.
Wish someone was “testing” on /\/\otorola cft’s.

Brilliant! Add signal through ADC and you can broadcast music. Also, what about setting a pin HIGH/LOW and a load resistor to increase the current consumption and then longer power wires/inductor to increase range?

Don’t think you’d be able to toggle a pin at clock frequency, tho you could probably use some strong harmonics. Possibly adding a wire to the +v line would do as an aerial. It doesn’t really matter though, nobody really needs a long-range software-based FM Rick Astley transmitter.

Well, this is pretty interesting. Instead of blasting out a song, you could transmit a short message in morse, maybe a URL? There are other popular ways to do this – the amateur radio guys are currently using the hell out of PSK-31. A small device like this could provide news or other information in a novel way, kind of like the USB dead drops. “Go to starbucks on main st, and tune to 88.3”

The output is a square wave that’ll likely cause interference to other devices. A simple low-pass filter can get it closer to a sine wave, but making it useful is going to require additional parts. Good trick FM’ing the frequency through the oscillator tuning register, though. We need more hacks like this.

This is cool, but I’m a little disappointed by the mistakes in this post. I know it’s probably just an oversight but this matters to some of us, Brian Benchoff. [Sprite] didn’t over-clock “the internal RC oscillator of an ATtiny45 to 24 MHz.”!! “After realizing the PLL running at four times the frequency of the oscillator” this is wrong. The PLL runs at 8 times. If you read his post you’ll see that he clocked the 8MHz internal oscillator to 12MHz which (with the 8x PLL) gives him a 96MHz timer (which IS right in the middle of the FM band) and which gives him (with the internal 4x division) a 24MHz system clock (4MHz higher than the rated speed).

A web search for something else brought me back to this older post. With respect to sprite mod’s cleverness here, I no see why I didn’t bookmark either this HAD post or the sprite mod page for this. There are better solutions for low power FM transmitters that have more flexibility. I do think this would make a more interesting introduction creating code for these sort of μprocessors after the blinking LED after the baby step has been taken.